Creative entrepreneurs navigate new food-service ecosystem with profitable returns
Chef-owner Asha Wheeldon, who says the home-delivery model enables her to give back to the community, in Vancouver on July 17, 2020.In early March, Asha Wheeldon, the chef-owner of Vancouver’s Kula Kitchen, was struggling to find new retail outlets for her Afro-vegan stews and sauces. Countless closed doors had already led her into catering, where she was just beginning to crack the lucrative wedding market. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she lost all her contracts overnight.
There is also Mona Ong Johannus and her niece Tess Tham, who cook ambrosial laksa curries, next-level chicken wings strewn with fragrant slivers of lime leaf and exquisite nyonya kueh rice-cake desserts through Bibik’s Singaporean + Peranakan Pop-Up. Vegan kimchi scones baked by Michelle Kelly will be available at the BIPOC pop-up at the Coho Commissary in Vancouver.“COVID-19 forced a lot of us to shift and start thinking outside our comfort zones,” Ms. Wheeldon says. “But now there is a movement happening and I would say that virtual is here to stay.”
“The push came from our customers,” Ms. Tham says. “We had never even considered delivery as an option.”Ghost kitchens, which deliver but are not attached to a sit-down dining room, were not an unknown phenomenon. For years, anyone who had anything to do with restaurants had been talking about this somewhat menacing trend. But the focus had always been on existing restaurants looking to expand their reach through spin-offs and search-engine optimization.
Ms. Tham and Ms. Ong Johannus still worry that there is something lost from not being able to break the proverbial bread with their customers or sharing meals face to face.“I love the idea of this super home-cooked food,” says Vancouver’s renowned Chinese food expert Lee Man, who has raved about Bibik’s online. “It reminds me of Si Fang Cai, the private kitchens in Hong Kong, a very meaningful tradition that implies you’re being welcomed into a secret inner sanctum.
When another member, Anika Makim Talwalkar from Indian Pantry Catering, asked the Coho managers if they could help with the BIPOC pop-up, a virtual market that would include food vendors from other commissaries, they immediately offered their café space and helped the organizers formulate a plan for logistics and pickup.
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